About three, maybe four years ago I had an idea for a website/web application that would function as a sort of Linkden for creative people, who need electronic press kits which can be easily thrown together and maintained by a lay person who has one of more creative offerings to promote but doesn't want to learn wordpress. There's also some other functionality planned down the line, to make it a site that truly offers artistic types agency of their careers, hence, the title artistic agency)

Anyway. At the moment the site is basically just full of placeholder profiles to look over how the interface flows. I'd love for anyone interested to give the site a glance and offer some feedback, or better yet sign up and create a profile and see how that experience flows.

Currently it's a ruby on rails project, but I'm learning Node.js, and thing that might be a better fit.

]]>Sun, 14 Oct 2018 18:43:33 +0000http://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2104&action=newhttp://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2096&action=new
Here it is for posterity, as a witness to the genesis of something I'm rather proud of on this very forum

The Hyacinth Disaster is a seven-part Audiodrama with a cast of eight people, including four from this forum: Teague (playing Argus), Boter (Dreadnought), BigDamnArtist (Eric Temple), and Me (Conlin and Grimm). It started as the very ghost of an idea in the chatbox, inspired by Teague's suggestion to check out ATC recordings for funsies. It was going to be a 15-20-minute adventure in space. It......well, it grew.

Over eight months or so, I wrote a script that was to be for three episodes. Which turned into four, then five...then seven. Fun stuff. Going into it, I set a couple major guiding goals for it: no narration, and no awful exposition. Basically, my idea was to build the world, story, and characters solely through dialogue, while avoiding "as-you-know" scenes and characters talking to each other in unnatural, unnecessary ways. The politics of the solar system had to be conveyed through a political argument; the basics of mining had to be conveyed for the benefit of a non-miner character; the jargon, technical details, and operations had to be figured out from context clues.

My goal was to avoid insulting the listener with spoonfeeding, and to reward the careful listener with a story and script worth paying attention to. I tracked down every plot-hole I could find, and filled it with in-world solutions. (Some of you may remember the last-minute concern I had about Argus' "extra air supply," which I ended up fixing with a dialogue edit; and the reason Argus wouldn't have his tape; those two I'm very proud of!) I also really wanted to create compelling characters with identifiable differences, characters the audience would connect with. Several hundred pages later, I think I've succeeded pretty well. Of course there's room for improvement, but I am very happy with this as my first project.

First project, and first script for anything I've ever written longer than a handful of 3-page skits. I'm really proud of that one

Aside from the actors here, I got a lot of help in the way of notes and feedback, and a truly divine trailer crafted by Saniss, the namesake of the plot's doomsday object. Teague also made a CGI model of the MRS Hyacinth (the eponymous ship), which literally drew tears from my eyes when I first saw it.

Through it all, this being my heart's project for a year and a half, I really put effort into being extremely receptive to criticism and varied opinions. I hope I succeeded on that point most of all. There are few things more annoying than an over-precious 'artist' who can't listen to suggestions for improvement

Since its launch, it's been listened to by nearly 500,000 people according to various metrics. It's been cited as "brilliant," "amazing," "terrible," "stilted," "incredibly human and brutally good," "unlistenable," "underrated," "lost me before episode 2," and was even given a review that went way too deep into the supposed spiritual symbolism of a conifer tree on Mars

It is the first large-scale project I've actually finished, and I am quite proud of it. Being a Christian and believing in a creative God, it was particularly special to me to enjoy my own little creative process. Thanks to everyone here, sincerely, for your encouragement and help! I hope you enjoyed working with me on it, too.

]]>Wed, 26 Sep 2018 02:50:48 +0000http://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2096&action=newhttp://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2094&action=new
I feel like this is worth a separate post, maybe just to me, but here we go!

Last year a friend of mine approached me with a script and was like "We should make this" and I was like OKAY! So we did. We shot May of 2016, wrapped September-ish, and for the last year and a bit has been doing the festival thing where we actually got a few awards and some nods which was cool. And we just released it online!

We're definitely pretty proud of it, all things considered. Zero budget, volunteer workforce through and through, I was DoP, Visual Effects artist/Motion Graphics and colourist...plus all the million other things you are on a project like this.

So enjoy!

There is also a little VFX breakdown if that happens to be your jam and you haven't seen it yet.

Description:Console-based painting program. Planned features include a decent selection of basic tools (brush, lines, shapes, fill, etc), animation capabilities, import and conversion of images to ASCII and export of ASCII frames to images.

Latest Update:10/07/2017 - Added 'brush pick' by holding CTRL when clicking either left or right mouse button to set the LeftMouse or RightMouse painting brush.The Menu (ESC key) now shows both left and right brushes. Set brush and colors by either left-clicking or right-clicking.Shift-Clicking draws lines (note, kinda buggy)Fixed bug with 'new' that failed to set the correct internal buffer size (caused draw issue).

I'll most likely add links to the Github project(s) after I clean the code (a lot).

]]>Sat, 07 Oct 2017 18:33:57 +0000http://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2091&action=newhttp://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2089&action=new
Just got an article I've been working on for a long time published by Ribbonfarm! I'm pretty proud of this one; it's about 4,000 words on Hannibal Lecter, Sweeney Todd, Michel Foucault, zombies, economic collapse, the apocalypse, and how all of those things go together. Reproducing the text here for all y'all; the original publication page is here.

Teague, Writhyn, this is the piece that spawned my cannibalistic theology rant in chat a couple of months back. Thanks for putting up with my ramblings.

- - - - - - - -

"It's Only Cannibalism If We're Equals"by Graham Warnken

Almost all accounts of cannibalism throughout the years agree on one thing: it’s a communal affair. Native funeral parties consume the flesh of the departed in a ritual of respect and grief. Foreign warriors devour foes in cruel rites of victory. A group of desperate survivors stranded on the sea or in a mountain pass draw straws to see which poor soul will offer himself up.

No matter the situation, the many consume the one—the deceased is partitioned out amongst his friends and relations, the defeated champion doled out to boost morale, the weakest link sacrificed that his companions might live. The latter in particular, while it doesn’t remove the central horror of the act, does possess a certain sense of justice. It allows us to see cannibals as more than monstrous. When we think of the Donner party, we don’t recoil in terror. We feel revulsion, but we understand. The doomed pioneers’ act, born of desperation, was all that allowed the community to scrape through its frigid circumstances, minus a few members.

In the Enlightenment era, this communal cannibalism was an excellent example of the bounds of natural law. Cătălin Avramescu’s An Intellectual History of Cannibalism describes the general philosophical view of anthropophagy by way of necessity:

When danger threatens us and another equally, we are obliged to think first of ourselves [. . .] we must set precedence on our own interests, when they enter into conflict with those of another. [. . .] If we accept that necessity—evident and unproblematic in the case of killing [an] aggressor—can excuse an action that is illicit in itself, then on the basis of this reasoning we must also tackle the aberration of forced cannibalism, since it is directed by the same natural and legal resorts.

As with any philosophical topic, there was a mind-numbing degree of back-and-forth about the anthropophagus over the course of the Enlightenment, chiefly because he functioned as a pawn in the larger game of whether or not natural law is valid. But the general philosophical consensus was clear. In cases where cannibalism is necessary for the survival of the community, it is abhorrent but permissible.

Even in politics, this pity for communal cannibals tends to hold true. “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich,” Rousseau allegedly said. This is a blueprint for political discussions of anthropophagy until very recently—it is the many, driven by both desperation and vengeance, who eat the few.

“In All of the Whole Human Race, Mrs. Lovett, There Are Two Kinds of Men and Only Two”

Michel Foucault, in Abnormal, describes the cannibal as “the popular monster” and notes that literal “absorption of each individual by the totality of the social body [. . .] is ritual cannibalism as the moment of the community’s exaltation.” In a Western political context prior to the late 20th century, the cannibal populace is not a series of individual monsters; it is an amorphous collective being, a horror created by the machinations of those in power. Clive Barker’s horror story “In the Hills, the Cities” is a bluntly literal take on the idea: an entire city of people assembles itself into one massive automaton and begins to walk, individuals forming components of a single functioning being. This unity of monstrous purpose, Foucault’s image of absorption by the community suggests, is a sort of bloody nirvana, the eradication of individual consciousness in a communion of literal flesh and blood. It may be horrific, but it’s ecstasy nonetheless.

And whose flesh does this collective being consume? Foucault, drawing the opposite of the cannibal collective’s popular monster, paints the picture of a “princely monster”—the despot, or incestuous sovereign. He writes:

The despot is the permanent outlaw, the individual without social ties [. . .] someone who, by his very existence and merely by his existence, performs the greatest crime [. . .] a total breach of the social pact by which the very body of society can exist and maintain itself. [. . .] The first juridicial monster to emerge in the new regime of the economy of punitive power [. . .] is not the murderer, the transgressor, or the person who breaks the laws of nature, but the person who breaks the fundamental social pact. The first monster is the king.

In the era when Rousseau made his famous quip, this despot’s avatar was the dictatorial monarch. By the time of Foucault’s writing, the classification broadens to include not only despotic political rulers but the tyranny of oligarchs and corporate heads, their own sort of “king.” The necessary component is a monstrous isolation, one that is the antithesis of — but every bit as disturbing as — the cannibal collective’s erasure of individual identity. The despot is defined by his utter contempt for the society whose members he exploits. He will always be more detestable than the anthropophagic masses because he commits his atrocities, not from necessity, but from a whim. He stands outside society, using its channels to benefit himself but refusing to partake in communion with its members.

Numerous popular embodiments of Foucault’s model of the cannibal masses vs. the despot exist, but none is more visceral than the penny-dreadful tale of Sweeney Todd. The demon barber first appeared in the serial novel The String of Pearls, published in 1846 as the industrial revolution chugged steadily to its zenith. His modus operandi? He grinds up the rich customers who enter his parlor and serves them back to the public via his neighbor’s pie shop. Musical theater composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim would later make explicit the original novel’s themes of the ground-under poor getting their own back. His play turns the character of Todd into a proto-Marxist redistributor of suffering: “The lives of the wicked should be made brief/For the rest of us, death will be a relief,” he lectures Mrs. Lovett, his partner in crime. She later joins him in proclaiming, “How gratifying for once to know/That those above will serve those down below!” as they lay their plans to cut their local princely monsters down to size.

In latter-day interpretations such as Sondheim’s, Todd, probably the most infamous cannibal in history prior to the last thirty years or so, is hell-bent on taking down the privileged—specifically the incestuous, licentious Judge Turpin. Turpin plays the role of despot to the hilt. He is willing to hang children for no reason other than their “probably deserving it.” Prior to the play’s events, he abused his position to transport Todd’s younger self to Australia, before raping the barber’s wife and stealing his child Johanna to raise as his own. Midway through the play, he determines to marry his now-mature ward; when she refuses his advances he sends her to a madhouse. Turpin’s ultimate demise at the hands of Todd, particularly in Tim Burton’s film adaptation of Sondheim’s play, is a near-literal example of cannibalistic ecstasy as described by Foucault, blood spurting from the Judge’s neck in orgasmic pulses as Todd thrusts his razor through the flesh again and again.

Cannibalism, while played for horrific intent, is ultimately meant by Todd to rob Turpin and other tyrants of their power. While Todd and Lovett’s culinary practices are presented as an object of disgust, their ethos, when contrasted against that of the Judge, is clearly superior. Turpin, a warped deformation of a Dickensian villain quite literally incestuous in his sovereignty, rapes and destroys simply because he feels like it. Todd and Lovett’s murder and cannibalism, slaying the corrupt for the sake of their victims, are positively rosy in comparison.

The model presented by Foucault in Abnormal depicts the cannibal masses, if not as heroic, at least as a tragic figure rather than an evil one. Their bloody vengeance is entirely reactionary, contingent upon the despot’s slaking his lusts at the expense of the community while refusing to partake in that community’s joys and sorrows himself. Cannibals may have their vices, but at least they stick together.

Or, that is, most of them do. Because even as Foucault was delivering the lectures in which he explored the duality of the despot and the cannibals, an American crime novelist decided to turn the whole conception on its head.

“I Never Feel Guilty About Eating Anything”

The character of Hannibal Lecter first appeared in Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon, published in 1981. He would reach the height of his fame when Anthony Hopkins portrayed him in the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, and found new life when Bryan Fuller adapted Harris’ universe for television with Hannibal (2013-15). His appearance represents a seismic shift in the public perception of the cannibal. Lecter is in nearly every aspect Foucault’s princely monster, the “incestuous sovereign.” However, his vice is not the corruption or sexual libertinism that Foucault’s moniker implies—it is the consumption of human flesh.

The good doctor, a brilliant psychiatrist whose taste for long pig cuts short his career, is about as far from a populist or a commoner as it’s possible to get. He’s a patron of the arts. He crafts the flesh of those he murders into exquisite dishes. His eidetic memory allows him to draw places like Florence from memory, in perfect detail. He possesses expert knowledge of literature, art, history, philosophy, and psychiatry. Prior to his imprisonment, his house and office are outfitted with ostentatious luxury. Discourtesy above all is “unspeakably ugly” to him. The latter is not out of a concern for the victims of discourtesy; it arises from his firm belief that he, in his superhuman refinement, is superior to all around him.

Lecter’s pathology is inextricable from his obsession with demonstrating his superiority to humanity. In Fuller’s Hannibal series, protagonist Will Graham sums up his work:

The Chesapeake Ripper kills in sounders of three. He did his first victims in nine days–Annapolis, Essex, Baltimore. He didn’t kill again for eighteen months, then did his next sounder of three in as many days, all of them in Baltimore. I use the term sounders because it refers to a small group of pigs. That’s how he sees his victims. Not as people, not as prey. Pigs.

Lecter may wear what his colleague Bedelia du Maurier refers to as a “person suit,” but that’s all it is. He may walk among society, disguised as one of its members, but he is irrevocably outside the community he preys upon. It’s an ingenious and chilling inversion of the standard political treatment of cannibals. The popular monster, rising up as a dehumanized collective to eat the rich, is nowhere present. Rather, the princely monster consumes the dehumanized collective, spouting in mockery of Rousseau, “Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude.”

An ill-conceived prequel novel that Harris was contractually obligated to write, Hannibal Rising, attempts to provide the character with a background more in keeping with the traditional view of cannibalism as a practice forced upon the powerless by the powerful (it involves Nazis and sisters and is about as silly as that description makes it sound). However, this is belied by Lecter’s words to FBI agent Clarice Starling in the novel The Silence of the Lambs:

Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism [. . .] nothing is ever anyone’s fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I’m evil?

Lecter, whether he is aware of it or not (and he probably is), identifies with Foucault’s princely monster. His very existence is a sort of Luciferian playing-at-God; he was birthed ex nihilo and, while he walks alongside humanity, lives forever outside, an observer and tormenter rather than a member. His choice to co-opt the popular monstrosity of cannibalism is a sardonic piece of cruelty on his part. His twisting of Rousseau’s quote gives away the game—he expresses his utter contempt for the community by turning its own particular monstrosity against it. Where cannibalism has for centuries existed in the Western political mind as a form of collective justice, Hannibal turns it into one more tool for the despot to use as an expression of his will.

Lecter represents the beginning of a larger change in the popular perception of cannibalism—and, more broadly, of serial killers. Seven years before the good doctor arrived on the scene, the latest pop-cultural cannibal icon was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Leatherface, an impoverished redneck who along with his family kills and butchers passersby. In 1980, one year before Red Dragon was published, the most controversial picture of the year was Cannibal Holocaust, a quasi-found-footage film which depicts the rape and murder of an invasive American film crew by an Amazonian cannibal community. This film was one of a wave of movies described as the “cannibal boom,” all of which depicted anthropophagic communities devouring privileged outsiders or intruders.

Post-Hannibal, the paradigm shifts dramatically. A decade after the publication of Red Dragon, the literary world was collectively awed and outraged by Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho. The book consists of a monologue delivered by Patrick Bateman, an obscenely wealthy yuppie who murders, rapes, and devours all manner of people—nearly all of them poor. From 1989-1996, Alan Moore’s comic series From Hell recast Jack the Ripper (who, among other obscenities, is purported to have eaten his impoverished victims’ organs) as Sir William Gull, the royal physician to Queen Victoria. The alleged cannibalistic tendencies of movie star Shia LaBeouf have become a prominent meme. Countless other Lecter knockoffs populate novels and films the world over. Hopkins’ portrayal of the character was voted the #1 villain performance of all time by the American Film Institute.

Lone, refined, privileged cannibals, within little more than a decade, achieved complete domination over the old model of anthropophagic communities. Lecter and his usurpation of the popular monster created a touchstone for the public imagination that is as strong today as it was when Red Dragon was first released.

This, then, is the cannibal of our times. A man who perceives himself as superhuman and has co-opted the subhumans’ methods to use against them. A princely monster who in his vices twists the popular. A sovereign who is not driven to his monstrosity by extremity but rather has always existed, immutable, unchanging. A despot who wears a “person suit” in order that he might pretend to be part of the community even though he remains forever outside. No longer can we divide our monsters into the incestuous sovereign and those who seek cannibalistic vengeance against him. Dr. Lecter, in his capturing of the popular imagination, has exploded Foucault’s model.

“And the Red Death Held Illimitable Dominion Over All”

And there we have it: two species of political cannibal. The elder, the anthropophagic community, had a long and celebrated run. For centuries it served as a visceral, horrifying image of the despot’s chickens come home to roost. If, as Louis XIV would have it, the cannonball is the last argument of kings, then the cannibal is the last argument of communities—the common people’s ultimate reassurance that someday, somewhere, there will be blood.

The currently dominant princely cannibal codified by Lecter is a natural metaphor in a society that’s in many senses being devoured by its richest members. American Psycho’s yuppie ripper Patrick Bateman is one of the more literal examples, but even when the connection isn’t made explicit, it’s there, lurking just beneath the surface. We will take and take and take until even your flesh is ours. Cannibalism, the last argument of the community? We’ll make you eat those words even as we eat you. The needs of the many may outweigh the needs of the few, but the appetites of the few outweigh the existence of the many.

And this, it would be natural to think, will continue to be the popular image of the cannibal for quite a while to come. The specter of wealth inequality does not so much haunt the West these days as outright possess it, after all. The obscenely privileged grow only moreso. The rest of us are left to rot in a morass of climate change, economic crashes, and oppression. The power of the princely cannibal only seems to grow.

There’s room, however, for another paradigm shift. One that’s subtler than the sudden ascendancy of Lecter and his kin, but a change in species all the same.

Because the popular monster has enjoyed its own ascendancy as of late. The word populism is what ultimately defines our current political epoch, and it’s obvious just how terrifying a word it is to the political establishments. What those establishments are thinking as their constituents rise up time and time again couldn’t be clearer: The natives are restless tonight, and God help me if they decide to pull out their cooking pots.

But it’s not nearly as straightforward a matter as the popular monster versus the princely one anymore. As we move toward the close of this decade, a chimera is on the rise—popular movements that churn with rage toward a perceived establishment, but ultimately strike at the first meat that comes within range, even if it’s their own. It’s a perverse and unsustainable beast, an ouroboros that, even as it swallows itself, is convinced it’s consuming the enemy.

The new species that has formed is the autocannibal. As in the classical political picture of the anthropophagus, a poor community has resorted to what they see as the only means left for them in a civilization dominated by despots of every stripe. They rise up to eat the rich and powerful, to extract vengeance with teeth and tongue.

And the despot feeds them meat. They eat and eat, with an ever-growing rapaciousness. But no matter how much they devour, they only find themselves growing hungrier. And that solidarity of anthropophagy, the exaltation that Foucault describes, is nowhere to be found.

Because they’re simply eating themselves, from the toes upward. Rather than acting as a single entity, extracting vengeance from those who deserve it, they’re nibbling away at their own extremities in bits and pieces. And the prince, gobbets of flesh hanging from his own mouth, is happy to assist them in this.

The poor strip themselves of healthcare while letting the rich keep their own. Those with nothing rail against the elites while happily allowing them to maintain their privileged positions. Groups turn on weaker groups in the name of economic or national or ethnic security. Rather than rising up against incestuous sovereigns, they tear away at themselves bit by bit while the princely monsters look on and approve. It’s a perversion of a symbiotic relationship, the desperate masses speeding their own destruction in the name of taking their own back while their economic and executive sovereigns reap the benefits and urge their constituents ever onward.

The autocannibal has sprung up before in the popular consciousness. The oldest example is probably the myth of Erysichthon—the king of Thessaly, who consumes himself as the result of punishment by the god Poseidon. In the world of Hannibal Lecter, too, the species pops up—the thoroughly repulsive millionaire Mason Verger is forced to carve off and eat his own face by the good doctor. But as these examples indicate, this type of cannibal is primarily a satire on the rich and powerful. Their insatiability is such that nothing can slake their lust for more, not even their own bodies. An amorphous communal mass slowly devouring itself is quite another matter; doing so at the behest of their intended target even moreso.

In a way, it’s even crueler than Hannibal Lecter’s outright theft of the anthropophagic recourse from those he deems inferior. At least in that instance, the good doctor’s victims have no illusions as to their own doom. In this new hybrid model of cannibalism, the despot doesn’t even have the decency to admit what he has stolen from the masses. He lets them believe they are extracting vengeance the only way they can even as all they do is chew themselves up.

Will we start to see this particular cannibalistic metaphor appear in films, television shows, books? In some ways, it’s already started to spring up, in roundabout form, through the 21st century’s fascination with zombie epidemics. A mainstay of zombie fiction is contrasting the flesh-hungry undead horde with tyrants who have taken over human survivors under the guise of “security.” All too often, the brutality of these tyrants and the desperation of their subjects are expressed via cannibalism.

In the 2013 video game The Last of Us, a lengthy segment of gameplay is devoted to escaping from the camp of the tribal leader David, who’s led his people into anthropophagy. His initial justification is that it’s a necessary step for survival, but as the game unfolds and David becomes increasingly unhinged it’s obvious that his culinary proclivities exist outside of need. While his people may consume each other out of desperation, David eats others because it makes him feel good. The zombie comic The Walking Dead features a similar character, the tyrannical Governor, who among other atrocities he’s committed references the eating of human flesh. Nor is this the only place where cannibalism pops up in the comic or its television adaptation—there are multiple instances in which survivor groups eat other humans for sustenance and tyrannical sovereigns indulge in their passion for gore.

Zombie fiction isn’t a perfect analogue to cannibal fiction—much of it is concerned with human-consuming masses who are undead and shambling rather than sentient. But whenever it turns to human-on-human cannibalism, despot-directed autocannibalism is its most prominent dynamic. Survivors of the plague, pushed to desperation out of fear and lack of resources, start to consume each other both figuratively—fighting and killing for resources—and literally—imitating the zombies’ devouring of human flesh when nothing else remains. Meanwhile, their leaders all too often exploit their followers’ pitiful condition to fulfill their own basest desires, indulging in anthropophagy not because of need but because of personal taste. It’s a post-apocalyptic betrayal of the idea of cannibalism as revenge against the powerful, one whose relevance only continues to grow as our own slow apocalypse looms ever larger in the rearview mirror.

Zombie stories have been a huge part of horror culture since George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead, but they’ve enjoyed a special resurgence in the last decade-and-a-half or so, a resurgence that arguably reached its peak with The Walking Dead and The Last of Us. It remains to be seen if the trend will begin to peter out, but I’ve a feeling that even if the zombie subgenre begins to fade from prominence, its depiction of burning the cannibalistic candle at both ends will continue.

Because it’s ultimately the only way to come to grips with the way cannibalistic power structures, both literal and metaphorical, truly work. Foucault’s old model isn’t adequate to encompass the nuances of the various ways in which we eat each other, but neither is Harris’ sovereign anthropophagus. In the end, it’s neither simple as eating the rich nor eating the rude; the two are not mutually exclusive, and all too often are entangled in increasingly labyrinthine ways. We lash out at whatever target we think will fill our bellies, each of us flailing by ourselves rather than acting with purpose.

We don’t have the luxury of two clearly delineated groups, one of which is the sole consumer of the other. And all too often, when long pig is being consumed it’s hard for the dinner guests to know whose meat it even is.

I posted some of my photography a little while back, but that was on my main website and I was finding that it wasn't a great fit, so I split it off. The work is ok, but it's a place to put images as I learn and grow.

Check it out. Or don't. But please do.

Evan

]]>Fri, 29 Sep 2017 17:46:43 +0000http://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2088&action=newhttp://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2085&action=new
So glad I finally get to share this. Of everything I've done for work, this might be my favorite - certainly the one that's the most along the lines of what I do outside of work. The couple came to us with the concept, we shot the "film" portion a couple months ago, and their wedding was last week, where we got the day-of footage and showed the completed project during their reception. As you might imagine, it went over amazingly. The couple loved it and my boss, who wasn't involved in the production at all aside from vetting the pre-edit once I was set with it, was super impressed with what I delivered. Enjoy!

(Because the couple work in emergency service capacities, and especially because of how they're portrayed here, they've asked that we limit its reach a bit, so no embedding - watch here: https://vimeo.com/230784006)

]]>Fri, 25 Aug 2017 13:51:39 +0000http://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2085&action=newhttp://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2080&action=new
Hey guys. So like, I live in Oregon. Most of you live in SoCal so you know about expensive west coast living. Well, I'm on one income and support a family, but I managed to buy a modest house that's a thousand square feet, two bed, one bath. It's a great little house for the family. Only problem is that there's no place for me to have an office for my freelancing. So I decided to make one. We have a big yard/driveway, so there's a great space toward the front. Tuff Shed was running a deal so I bought an 8x10 lean-to, got an electrical permit and dug a trench from my house to the shed. My buddy did the electrical (that's what he does) and we've been putting in insulation, drywall, painting, and this week we're doing the flooring and finishing it up.

The shed in all its glory, the day it was delivered/built in my driveway. At this point it's not painted (adding paint was an extra cost).

This is a pano of the shed from inside when it was delivered.

The trench I dug from my main breaker box on the side of my house to the shed. It took forever. 70 feet in all, had to be 20 inches deep to pass inspection. If I never dig another trench as long as I live, I'd die happy.

My buddy setting up power from the main breaker.

I used a spade drill bit to make holds through the studs and run wiring to each outlet.

Where the light switch will be.

Wiring up the box on the shed side.

Sheetrock's half in, here.

From the outside, now there's an external outlet and a light socket where we'll hang an outside light.

Drywall is all hung! My son rockin' it inside. Still need to tape off the drywall and paint, then do the flooring. The gap in the drywall over the boxes is where the heating/cooling unit will go.

The exterior, which I managed to put some gray paint on during memorial day. I still need to paint the trim.

Newly gray wall and finished breaker box from my front yard.

Anyways, not quite done yet. This week we'll be laying the floors, finishing up the painting, installing the AC unit, outlets and light fixtures. Then I'll be putting my desk and chair in there, as well as all my figurines and I'll finally have a place to run my freelance business out of. Not that sitting at my kitchen table on a macbook to do all my creative work isn't a bucket of laughs.

I am currently working through an internship as the final stage of obtaining as Master's degree in Mental Health Counseling. As part of this process, I am co-leading a Yoga Calm group, which is a yoga class designed to help those with mental health or behavioral health problems to control depression, anxiety and mindfulness. A lot of the poses are pretty standard yoga, but the management of breathing and body promotes better mental health and well being. Here's the website if you want to learn more: http://www.yogacalm.org/about/

As part of this process, I have been assisting another counselor in building different classes based upon age. One facet is taking time for a mindfulness meditation, and I wanted to develop some basic symbols that people use to help with the visualization. And my inner nerd went "I have an idea!"

I want to develop something that is similar to the emotional spectrum from Green Lantern, in which seven emotions are represented by power rings, and basic symbols. However, I am trying to develop concepts that focus on positive emotions or traits, with an associated color.

Here is some basic symbols I found that I think fit the bill:

If you have read this far, thank you. I am going to be developing this concept over the next couple of weeks, and need some eyes to help me create the colors and effects. Unfortunately, this is on a volunteer basis, so I'm not expecting anyone to build graphics from the ground up. But, as I post progress, I would greatly appreciate feedback on the concept and development, or any graphic help if any one has time.

]]>Thu, 20 Apr 2017 02:07:50 +0000http://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2077&action=newhttp://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2076&action=new
Every year I post a Halloween song - but on October the 31st of 2014 I posted this...

This is where you guys maybe able to help me out; my broad Geordie scratch track reading of it is horrid (see above) so looking for alternatives to my own.

Simple though it may be, here is the Crotchets' Ghost Train poem.

Crotchet the Ghost Train owner was always unpleasedHis Train was not scarey - the kids did not scream.He tried spiders on stringsand ghouls in bed sheets.Yet the children just laughedunscared in their seats.In a moment of madness he tied a rope to the backand stood in the darknessfor the traindown track.Tormented by laughterHe wept silently in pain -still stood in the darknessawaiting the train.As it came ever closer it took the ropes slack -A noose around his neckthere was no going back."This is not scarey"the children all said.Not knowing of whatlay in wait up ahead.The train jerked to a stop with an eery bell ring -the children all screamingto see Crotchets feet swing.They ran from the ride -all frightened an weary.Now Crotchets Ghost TrainWILL ALWAYS BE SCAREY.

]]>Sun, 25 Dec 2016 19:04:17 +0000http://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2064&action=newhttp://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2062&action=new
(note: updated the title to "The Hell With This" - formerly known as the untitled Mark and Chad podcast.)

I'll keep this all contained to one thread, but... Myself and Mark Heiliger started a podcast we've been mulling over for ages. Rather than sit around and try to figure something classy and good out, we decided just to shut up and record whatever. Our goal, for the most part, has been to focus on lesser-known films, cult, art-house, indie, foreign, whatever... you know, the kind of shit that friends in your head would never touch.

Episode ONE starts with a little podcast on the 2010 movie "Monsters", directed by Gareth Edwards (Star Wars: Rogue One). Figured it was a timely selection, and a great little movie thru-out. Now, if you HAVEN'T SEEN "Monsters", don't fret completely - we start our episodes by simply gearing up for the screening, talking expectations, etc, for approximately 15 minutes before we stop to watch the movie (without you) - so you can always listen up until that point and decide if you actually want to listen further or stop to watch the movie. We'll see how this goes.

Performers of note: Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able. Special mention of Mario Zuniga Benavides, the awesome "ticket-seller" character, who has never acted in anything else.

]]>Thu, 15 Dec 2016 21:55:38 +0000http://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2062&action=newhttp://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2060&action=new
So my favorite hoodie (best christmas gift from my wife ever) is three years old, and it's starting to wear a bit thin. This is what it looks like new:

I've decided to see if I can get a new one made, since they don't really sell them anymore (I need one that's a darker fabric, too. Dirt and dust, blahblah).

As you see, I've adjusted it a bit. The M is bigger, and the eye is looking down (cause big monster), and I'm toying with the idea of a pithy quote or sort of motto at the bottom.I like the "XXXXXXXXXL" joke on the original, but i'm just trying stuff out.Thoughts, anyone? Suggestions?

]]>Sat, 05 Nov 2016 21:38:17 +0000http://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2060&action=newhttp://friendsinyourhead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2051&action=new
Recently it was my mothers 70th Birthday and so me and my sister chipped in to pay for her to have a hot air balloon ride, Now she's not always great at getting presents for me and not wanting to go alone, got me a ticket as well!

So I of course took along my GoPro and grabbed some pretty cool shots and edited them down a couple of minutes.

These games are all officially dead. The new year has prompted me to reevaluate my current goals, and I've decided to set some new ones. I'm still going to be pushing forward with the C++ thing, and some of the goals I've set for my programming progress remain unchanged, but these specific projects are over. Instead, I will be focusing my learning on the core fundamentals of the languages (C++ as well as straight C), and how they work. Not in a general sense, but instead in a more theoretical way.

My current project is a GUI system so I can circumvent the Win32 API. Instead of using their weird-o nightmare systems, I'm going to write my own system. Typical GUI systems are these weird rigid constructs where you have to define your window's layout, define widgets, define multiple logic systems to deal with the various states of those widgets and buttons and controls, then create an event system loop that goes through and checks against all of that state to see which thing needs to be handled when the user clicks on this or that...

It's a very cumbersome and, frankly, dumb way of doing things. There have recently been a number of people who have started using something called "Immediate Mode GUI". This is loosely described as a GUI system that works more like the more basic systems in a game. You just write a button object and give it its own internal state, and the button simply does what it needs to do when you push it / mouse over it / etc. This removes the need for a complicated event system and huge list of state when checking those events and makes the User Interface much more malleable and dynamic.

There are some drawbacks: They can be a little laggy (one frame of lag is not uncommon), and because you're generally redrawing everything for every frame, a super-complicated UI can actually cause some FPS issues if you fuck it up. But the flexibility and ease of use will, I think, more than make up for it.

So yeah. My current project is still to write a text editor, but now it's ore of a test-bed for my UI system as well as a thing unto itself. I'll be able to add to both as the need arises.

CURRENT VERSION:

ORIGINAL POST:

SPOILER Show

Oh shit, son.

So I decided that I needed to scale back considerably in my attempts to program functioning things, so I have started work on a console-based Rogue-like game. It is a true Rogue-like in the sense that movement will be turn-based and as much as humanly possible is going to be randomly generated.

Yesterday I set up the technical bits out of the way for setting the window up properly, and today I worked on making a movable player character you can run around the screen. In the process of making the character I figured out a far more effective way to set up the window, so essentially I just rewrote the entire thing this morning.

The game itself is going to not break new ground in the Rogue-like genre or anything. The goal is to try to get to level 99 of the titular Tower Of Life, where it is fabled that you will be granted immortality. Each level (except for the first and last...) will have randomly generated layouts with up and down stairs (i plan on letting players backtrack throughout the entire tower if they choose to), a bunch of enemy types and perma-death and all that standard crap.

The player, however, will also be totally random as far as stats, starting gear, etc. I have fleshed out the basic systems for enemies and items, and I think I have a really good system to generate the maps. I just have to start actually implementing them

The next step for now is to give my little player a map to run around in. Hopefully will have something to show for that by tomorrow. Right now I need to eat, tho. Starving